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Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Obama in 2015 and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019. Henson in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” and accompanied Henson to the 2017 Academy Awards. Johnson worked with NASA for nearly three decades before her retirement in 1986. Johnson also became the first woman to write a technical report in NASA’s flight research division with a 1960 paper, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position,” co-authored with Ted Skopinski.
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They provided the calculations for several of the first successful manned space missions, including Alan Shepard’s in 1961 and John Glenn’s in 1962, when he became the first American to orbit the earth. Johnson was part of NASA’s “Computer Pool” team in the 1960s, which was largely composed of black women who processed data by hand. These lectures were given by engineers that later formed the Space Task Group, NACA's section on space travel.Pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose calculations played a major role in the development of the Space Shuttle program, died Monday at the age of 101, NASA confirmed.
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#Katherine johnson nasa report series
For example, some of her math equations were used in a lecture series compendium called Notes on Space Technology. She began her career working with data from flight tests, but her life quickly changed after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. In 1953, when she was back in the workforce, Johnson joined the West Area Computing section at Langley. She quickly enrolled, but left to have children. Two years later, when the college chose to integrate its graduate schools, Johnson and two male students were offered spots. After graduating with highest honors, she started work as a schoolteacher in 1937. She attended a high school on the campus of West Virginia State College by age 13, and began attending the college at age 18. Johnson showed early brilliance in West Virginia schools by being promoted several years ahead of her age, according to NASA (opens in new tab). Katherine Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard's mission in 1961 and John Glenn's mission in 1962. Although described as a behind-the-scenes sort of worker, she helped many people get promoted or become supervisors. "She discovered that occasionally it was something as simple as a lack of a couple of courses, or perhaps the location of the individual, or perhaps the assignments given them, and of course, the ever present glass ceiling that most women seemed to encounter," Champine wrote.Īfter 30 years with NACA and NASA (at which point she was an engineer), Jackson decided to become an equal opportunity specialist to help women and minorities. She also tried to help other women advance in their career, according to the biography, by advising them on what educational opportunities to pursue. Her job was to extract the relevant data from flight tests. Jackson began her career as a schoolteacher, and had several other jobs before joining NACA.Īs a computer with the all-black West Area Computing section, she was involved with wind tunnels and flight experiments. She graduated with high marks from high school and received a bachelor of science degree from the Hampton Institute in Mathematics and Physical Science, according to a biography written by Gloria R. Mary Jackson was a successful NASA engineer and advocate for women and minorities in the field.